AMD may be betting future success on Bobcat, not Bulldozer

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Pick a chip, bet the future

Bulldozer, despite its flaws, is still a vital component of AMD’s roadmap. The second-generation Bulldozer core, codenamed Piledriver, will power the next-generation of AMD’s desktop parts while the APU version of the core (codenamed Trinity) handles the mobile side of the equation. Yield improvements and process tweaks at GlobalFoundries could make current-generation Bulldozers more attractive by giving AMD more leeway to increase clock speeds and/or create lower TDP variants at current speeds.

Enthusiasts and armchair architects are hoping Trinity will fix some of what ails Bulldozer, but AMD’s guidance on what to expect has shifted markedly. Last summer, at the AMD Fusion summit, Rick Bergman, the now-departed head of AMD’s products group, told journalists “Trinity’s… performance will be at least 50% faster than performance you see today from the Llano.” Not only has AMD trimmed that figure back to 20%, they’re now calling it “uplift” as opposed to “improved performance.”

The string of executive departures and the associated muttering about mobile products is probably indicative of a sea change early this year. AMD debuted two brand-new CPU architectures in the past 10 months. One of them hit its performance and TDP targets. One of them didn’t. One of them is a mobile and possibly a hand-held part long term; one of them was intended for conventional desktop/mobile/server workloads. Faced with a choice between scaling and evolving a functional chip or going back to fix one that failed to deliver as promised, we suspect AMD opted for the former. If we’re right, we’ll see Bobcat bringing home an increasing percentage of AMD’s bacon by the end of next year.

From a certain perspective, AMD’s fallback position is actually much stronger than it’s ever been before. In 2007, when K10/Barcelona failed to deliver as promised, the company was basically stuck, with no choice but to grind through the revision process until it developed a better product on 45nm. AMD lacks Intel’s financial resources, but having two different CPU architectures in-house gives it far more room to manuever than it would have if Bulldozer was the only show in town.

Off the cuff

There’s a harsh truth here that needs to be acknowledged. It’s been ten years, nearly to the day, since AMD launched the first Athlon MP CPU and the associated 760MP chipset. The gesture was largely symbolic — AMD didn’t start gaining any appreciable percentage of the workstation/server market until Opteron debuted in April, 2003 — but the 2001 launch was recognized as the first shot in a broadening war. With the Athlon/Athlon XP firmly established on the desktop, AMD was determined to break into the workstation/server market.

Once Opteron arrived, it did. By the end of 2007, AMD held 25-30% of the server market, 30% in desktops, and 14% in mobile. And from there everything went down hill. Today, Intel holds an estimated 94.5% of the server market.

Why? Because, regardless of whether or not you think Intel sabotaged AMD’s success in 2004-2006 through the use of predatory rebate practices, fighting Chipzilla is like attacking a rubber wall with a sledgehammer. There have been several periods in the past twelve years when AMD has smartly outmaneuvered Intel by leveraging existing technology and combining it with a competitive CPU. Every time it’s happened, Intel has taken hits, lost market share, and gone back to the design lab to build something better. It’s easy to forget that Prescott — easily Intel’s highest-profile failure in the past six years — drove then-record revenues and broke sales records. While it’s true that Intel tore up a lot of Netburst-based roadmaps in the wake of the chip’s debut, the company already had an entire design team working on the Pentium-M.

AMD has had to make do with a tiny fraction of Intel’s R&D budget, not to mention its foundry capacity. As a result, the company’s performance has essentially relied on a series of Hail Mary passes beginning with the original K7 in 1999. When they’ve succeeded, AMD has thrived — but it’s been six years since the first dual-core parts rolled off the fab lines. AMD badly needed Phenom to shine in 2007. Instead, it sank. Phenom II came along a year later and cleaned up much of what was wrong with Phenom, but was never going to challenge Nehalem for the top of the performance market.

Ten years and billions of dollars later, maybe someone at AMD decided it was time to try something different, to attack the problem from a different direction. All the spunk and gumption in the world hasn’t produced products that could consistently challenge Intel. It hasn’t made shareholders any money. It hasn’t even produced a measurable long-term gain. After a decade of struggle, it’s easy to see why a lot of folks at AMD (including all the former executives) would want to keep fighting, but that doesn’t make it smart.

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Anonymous

Intel certainly succeeded in artificially limiting AMD’s revenues by threatening/bribing manufacturers (and even retailers like MediaMarkt). In an industry that requires billions of dollars in R&D, starving a competitor from fair revenues is a great way to starve off their basis for innovation – R&D dollars.

Hopefully, those Wall Street protests might yield less corporate influence on our regulatory agencies? It took the FTC 10-years to actually lift a finger to do something about Intel’s blatant bribes – like 6 billion dollars paid under the table to Dell in exchange for not using AMD processors.

Anonymous

Intel certainly succeeded in artificially limiting AMD’s revenues by threatening/bribing manufacturers (and even retailers like MediaMarkt). In an industry that requires billions of dollars in R&D, starving a competitor from fair revenues is a great way to starve off their basis for innovation – R&D dollars.

Hopefully, those Wall Street protests might yield less corporate influence on our regulatory agencies? It took the FTC 10-years to actually lift a finger to do something about Intel’s blatant bribes – like 6 billion dollars paid under the table to Dell in exchange for not using AMD processors.

Anonymous

This has been my perception of the Fusion design efforts. AMD has managed to really offer some impressive performance gains with the new bobcat designs.

On a related note, it appears that AMD has realized that FPU (floating point unit) performance, that is critical to many apps, has a ready made massive improvement that’s been waiting to be reintegrated onto the CPU Die. To gain this impressive performance boost, they’ve taken the GPU (stream processors) and are starting to use them to boost that FPU performance. Once they’ve completed the reintegration, I feel that AMD will soundly trounce Intel in raw fpu performance, which will be noticed by apps such as WinZip, WinRar and anything else that depends on it heavily such as TrueCrypt and Norton/Macaffee

Joel Hruska

Long term, AMD intends to allow the GPU to run x86 code. That process is going to take several more product generations. I’d be surprised if we see that level of sharing between CPU and GPU before 2014.

andrew hodge

wait… what? Since when did amd say they wanted the GPU to run x86??? That was intel, and they failed miserably at it. Your thinking of opencl, aren’t you….

Joel Hruska

Andrew,

At the Fusion Developer Summit this past summer, AMD unveiled plans to unify CPU/GPU memory address space. That means the GPU will be upgraded with the ability to understand x86 pointers as well as the adoption of a fully coherent memory structure between CPU and GPU.

AMD has also noted that long-term, the GPU could be leveraged to run FPU code rather than having an independent FPU built into a CPU.

Intel used traditional x86 cores to build a GPU. That’s not at all what AMD is doing — but all of AMD’s plans, including the heterogeneous computing initiative, point towards a unified code base between CPU and GPU.

Jeremy Collake

Understanding x86 pointers for easier memory address space unification is *not* executing x86 code. Anyway, you are both describing the same basic principle, that the new chips will be unified with processor(s) capable of executing either instruction set and/or better interoperating. I said this again below, in different language. Forget taking a GPU and making it a CPU, or a CPU and making it a GPU. They are both processors, and the instruction sets and design principles are what make them either a CPU or GPU at present. Eventually that distinction may disappear, hidden on the chip itself with dedicated processors for the very different functions required of a GPU and CPU.

Jeremy Collake

CPU or GPU, they are *both* processors. Therefore, to say one or the other will run the other’s instruction set isn’t really reflecting the fact that they are the same thing in very different forms. Integration is a more proper term, in that they’ll be integrated into a single *new* chip with processor(s) that understand both instruction sets, and/or are capable of better interoperating with each other. They aren’t going to take one or the other and make it ‘understand’, they will build a new chip with extended, unified, capabilities.

Interesting story. Don’t agree at all. We all know now that FX has some issues with the Win7 scheduler and there is some L1 thrashing, which is more than likely limiting bandwidth of the L2.

BD is a great product ahead of even Intel in terms of ISAs and features. I can imagine CTI dropping the current 125W parts to 95W by Trinity. And a B3 rev will probably fix the tagging problem in the decoder.
But even more, when things start to use AVXXOP behind FMA, AMD will totally own perf. At least until Haswell.

As far as Bobcat, perhaps Dirk said I’ll quit before I’ll go up against ARM and QualcommnVidia. He was smart, Intel has ZERO phones at this point while Tegra has nearly all of the ARM tablets for Android and was the reference device for the “H” release.

With BD, AMD made a bold move, but for once Intel is behind in advancing ISA. If AES can use FMAC. I would think that servers would be loving it. Encrypting HDDs would be super fast.

Most people just glossed over the benches without any analysis while I looked at every possible factor and can conclude the best is yet to come. Though playing 1920 and 2560 is cake, so I can forgive not scoring higher in CineBench or Super Pi.

andrew hodge

I think most people are with you. Have you read the bulldozer reviews on newegg? 90% are very positive. The only thing keeping the 8150 from being a five-egg product is the stupidly high number of trolls posting stupid crap pretending to own the product.

Anonymous

to Christian Howell:
One thing you can’t denounce though is the lack of floating point advancement. the shared FPU on the Bulldozer architecture will kill on-demand FP processing per core.

Otherwise, Bulldozer is a nice design. I think once they can scale power use back perfect the QA quality, it will be set. But, that’s months away and means that FX won’t be the SB killer some people had hoped.

to Andrew Hodge
I have seen a lot of input on FX from a lot of people on multiple sites. I’ve seen everything from people getting the 8150 to near 5GHz under air…to one guy I know whose 8120 won’t post at stock speed and has to be downclocked under 3GHz and undervolted to even post.

I think that GF has a wafer process problem and that they are not the quality they need to be. Hence, some of the chips come off champs and some come off utter duds.

But, I agree about the troll thing. Newegg has always let people express their opinions on stuff, but I think it’s time they start requiring a valid order number and customer login to post reviews. I used to trust Newegg’s user reviews a lot, but anymore I see a lot of … how dare I say… questionable posting/input there.

Anonymous

AMD must accelerate its fusion integration plans and aggressive its lower power consumption and go the SOC route if it want to trump Intel. I say Intel will be looking at buying Nvidia or Imagination if AMD Fusion starts to eat into its laptop marketshare.

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